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Any reason not to use ESXi?

We have 3 identical HP DL380 G5 servers, one of which is running a vmware server with one VM running on it.

I started the process of porting these systems to ESXi ($ 0, "embedded" system); two physical machines will have% 99.99 of the time exactly 1 VM, the other will have 2.

For this, the main advantage I get is the ability to disaster recovery. Our tape backup system does not have a "bare metal" capability. However, I can manually copy the VM images to another server. Even if they are months old, they provide a fairly close-to-instant, further recovery from tape.

As the free version, I don't get a "consolidated backup" of VMWare or VMotion. And I need to do control of physical machines. But ESXi takes 32MB of disk and it specifically supports the server.

With this in mind, is there a reason not to always use ESXi if the hardware supports it? Even if you only plan to run 1 VM on this hardware?

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Well, in your case, ESXi is your best bet. There are times when you want to use VMware Server, but not for that. That's what ESXi is for. For example, I am using VMware Server on top of my OS for development, so I can test and use different distributions, etc. I wouldn't do VMware Server for a production server as you describe, but ESXi is the best choice.



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Is it a great idea to virtualize the entire OS to be able to make backups? NOT! its not ... Damn hype for virtualization without real need.



There are free alternatives for backing up almost any OS, image or archive of your choice.

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To be more precise, XSIBackup will allow you to hot backup any version of ESXi from 5.1 and higher, it maintains a backup of the guest OS while it is running, and can even transfer it to an additional ESXi box via an IP address and leave it ready for inclusion:

https://33hops.com/xsibackup-vmware-esxi-backup.html

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